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In 2020, a long cypress barn near the tiny town of Drew, Mississippi, captured the attention of author Wright Thompson. Here, in the early morning hours of August 28, 1955, 14-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till was kidnapped and then tortured and murdered by a gang of white men. His capital offense? Allegedly whistling at the wife of one of his killers. It’s a story that’s been told by other writers, but in the hands of native Mississippian Thompson, the crime and the troubled soil out of which it grew take on a profound new resonance.
Thompson grew up a half-hour’s drive away, yet he never knew that a nondescript structure just 23 miles south of his family’s home was the site of a savage murder. What’s more: It was still standing, without a marker or sign indicating what transpired there. Thompson learned of the barn from Patrick Weems, a local activist who runs the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, an organization that was formed to push Tallahatchie County to acknowledge its fault in Till’s murder and the obstruction of justice after the crime.
“Ultimately it’s a book about the fight to erase versus the fight to remember.”
Interviewed from his home in Oxford, Mississippi, in an unmistakably Southern-accented voice that comes rumbling from a place deep in his body, Thompson tells BookPage, “As a Mississippian, I needed to know more about this barn.”
The result is The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, a deeply reported history rooted in that unique and specific piece of ground.
Drew is located within a 36-square mile segment of Sunflower County that, Thompson writes, has “borne witness to the birth of the blues at the nearby Dockery Plantation, to the struggle of [1960s voting rights activist] Fannie Lou Hamer, to the machinations of a founding family of the Klan, and to the death of Emmett Till.” The exact legal location of the barn is “Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, measured from the Choctaw Meridian,” a phrase that is repeated, occasionally in altered forms, more than 60 times in The Barn. Thompson says that by the time the book reaches its conclusion, he hopes his very intentional repetition “carries the swelling power of chorus.”
The Barn was a passion project, one that propelled Thompson through hundreds of interviews, some 100 visits to the barn, and archival research in places as distant as Spain and England. However, “this was not work,” he tells BookPage. “This was something I was going to do whether anybody knew anything about it or not.” Though Thompson is best known as a writer for ESPN, his last book, 2020’s Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon and the Things That Last, revealed that his interests extend beyond the world of sports.
“I hope everybody who reads this book will learn that telling the truth about ourselves doesn’t make you a weaker American; it makes you a stronger one.”
After sketching out the story of Emmett Till’s murder and the predictable, yet inexcusable exoneration of the men who committed it, Thompson moves into a detailed economic and cultural history of that small patch of land the barn stands on and the territory surrounding it. Though his survey spans some 400 years, he homes in most on the period from the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 through 1933, the year Congress saved the cotton industry from collapse amid the Great Depression. In that era, he says, “cotton was oil,” and Mississippi “had a seemingly limitless supply of the world’s most important commodity.”
Thompson says that one crucial element of The Barn is its focus on people like Till’s cousin Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., who was visiting Mississippi with Till at the time of the murder; Parker’s wife, Marvel; and Drew residents like Gloria Dickerson, who integrated the town’s school system as a child and has spent her retirement working to preserve the memory of Emmett Till and give meaning to his life and death. It was important to Thompson that he honor their efforts to secure justice for Till, he says, “because ultimately it’s a book about the fight to erase versus the fight to remember.”
The work of Till’s family members and Drew residents culminated in the 2023 authorization of a national monument to commemorate Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, whose insistence on forcing Americans to confront the brutality of her son’s lynching by allowing photos of his corpse to be published in Jet magazine galvanized the Civil Rights movement. Like the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921 and the murder of George Floyd a century later, the killing of Emmett Till is one of the most heinous racial crimes in an American history that’s deeply stained with them.
Thompson also candidly interrogates his own ambivalent relationship to his home state, writing that “the story of Till’s death is the story of the rise and rot of a tribe of people, of which I am one.” In this regard, he’s unsparing of his own ignorance. Near the end of the book, for example, he recounts his experience in a boarding school as a 16-year-old, where he festooned the walls of his dorm room with Confederate flags.
Questioned about his choice of decor, he says he had buried the memory for many years, but when it suddenly surfaced as he listened to a speech at an Emmett Till commemoration, he raced home to record it. When asked why he felt he had to take ownership of that long-ago episode, he admits some initial ambivalence, but then says, “Man, if you’re not doing this, you need to give the money back. If you’re not doing this, then everything you say you want this book to be is a lie.” The Barn is an eloquent antidote to Americans’ propensity to forget, and Thompson hopes there will be some healing power flowing from this work.
“The story of Till’s death is the story of the rise and rot of a tribe of people, of which I am one.”
“I’m a very proud American,” he says. “I hope everybody who reads this book will learn that telling the truth about ourselves doesn’t make you a weaker American; it makes you a stronger one. And seeing ourselves clearly doesn’t make us a lesser country, but a greater one. If the Mississippi Delta, and therefore America, has any future at all, it has to start with standing on one postage stamp of ground and saying, ‘This is what happened here.’ I certainly didn’t start off with that intention, but that became my sort of prayer for the thing. It’s not a book. It’s a map.”
Even as he expresses that ambition for his work, Thompson is notably humble in describing the product of his efforts: “I feel a profound sense of being a carrier of something, not the creator of it. There are going to be a lot of books written about this murder. There have been; there will be a lot more. So I’m very aware of being a tiny piece in a large mosaic of people still trying to understand how a 14-year-old child gets tortured for whistling.
“You can’t go back in time and stop it. But you can go back in time and understand exactly and specifically over the longest possible arc how all of these people came to be occupying the same piece of land on the same day at the same time in 1955. And I hope that answering that question adds to the mosaic, not just of that murder, but of every one like it.”
Photo of Wright Thompson by Evan France.
In Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation, Tiya Miles explores the lives of a group of remarkable women. As she tells the stories of Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Tubman, Pocahontas and other notable female figures, Miles looks at the ways in which the great outdoors impacted their personal development and understanding of the world. Her narrative is a beautifully observed testament to the importance of place. Reading groups will find a range of discussion topics, including women’s empowerment and the influence of nature.
What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds by Jennifer Ackerman offers fresh perspectives on the nocturnal predator. Over the centuries, the owl has been portrayed as intelligent, vigilant and enlightened while remaining strangely inscrutable. Ackerman penetrates the bird’s unique mystique as she teams up with ornithologists and other experts to find out how owls connect with each other, acquire food and migrate. Blending the latest research with her own discerning impressions, Ackerman delivers an exceptional scientific study that’s revealing and accessible.
In Bicycling With Butterflies: My 10,201-Mile Journey Following the Monarch Migration, Sara Dykman shares the story of the remarkable odyssey she undertook in 2017. Beginning in Mexico and traveling on a ramshackle bike, Dykman followed the migration course of the eastern monarch butterfly to draw attention to the vulnerability of the species. In a tale that’s funny, insightful and poetic, Dykman reflects on the fragility of nature and the challenges of bike travel, and acquaints readers with the majestic monarch. Themes of ecology, exploration and solitude make this a rewarding book club pick.
Melissa L. Sevigny chronicles the journey of two mavericks in Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon. The hazards of the Colorado River did not deter botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter, who navigated the treacherous waterway in 1938 in order to index the Grand Canyon’s plant species. Aided by a small team, the duo traveled for 43 days. Sevigny brings their expedition to vivid life in a narrative that’s at once a rip-roaring adventure story and a thoughtful account of the natural world.
Nemonte Nenquimo and her family lived within nature, with food from the river, the rainforest and their gardens. A monkey was her childhood pet. According to family lore, she knew she would become a spirit jaguar when she died. But things were changing fast: A huge metal tube had descended from the sky not too many years before she was born. The missionaries who emerged from it didn’t speak her language, but they persuaded her community’s leaders to put a mark on a paper in return for clothing and other gifts.
Within a couple of decades later, her river was black with pollution, much of her forest was cut down, her community’s men had been coerced into laboring for oil companies in exchange for pieces of paper their way of life had no use for. White people said Nenquimo and her community must worship their god. She and other children were herded into schools that forced them to put aside their traditions.
A Waorani woman from Ecuador’s Amazon region, Nenquimo co-founded the Indigenous-led Ceibo Alliance that scored a major legal victory in 2019, protecting half a million acres of rainforest from oil drilling. Nenquimo has been lauded internationally for her activism; now, with husband Mitch Anderson, an American environmentalist, she is telling her story in the inspired and rare We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People.
In this lyrically written memoir, Nenquimo takes us inside her world, with its tensions between her family’s shamanistic traditions and the initial allure of the Christian missionaries, who taught her to read and write in Spanish, allowing her to communicate more widely. But this education came at a cost that traumatized Nenquimo for years. She describes her emotional journey through a deeply spiritual perspective, including one remarkable scene in which drinking ayahuasca brings her a revelatory vision.
Nenquimo sharply conveys the sheer confusion and terror of colonialism for the Waorani and other Indigenous peoples. Missionaries, oil executives and government officials used underhanded methods to wrest control of the region from families like Nenquimo’s. Ironically, the missionary education gave Nenquimo and others the tools they needed to fight back. Her story is one of fierce determination to claim a heritage that was nearly stolen from her.
When Joanna Brichetto sees potato chips, she craves goldfinches. An offbeat association? Sure. One imbued with enthusiasm and nature-loving logic? Absolutely. You see, she explains, the goldfinch’s call sounds like “potato-chip, potato-chip,” and the Lay’s Classic Potato Chips bag is a yellow “not unlike a male goldfinch in breeding plumage.”
That perspective-shifting, find-joy-in-daily-life revelation is just one of many the blogger and certified Tennessee naturalist shares in her wonderful, wonder-inducing debut, This Is How a Robin Drinks: Essays on Urban Nature.
Brichetto—a former BookPage contributor —believes that “by paying attention to the natural world we have a chance to figure out who, where, and when we are.” Fortunately, “nature is all around”—and in this almanac organized by season, she encounters and explores nature in places we expect, like parks and gardens and birdbaths. But what about thrift stores, grocery bags and abandoned mall parking lots?
If we stroll rather than stride through our yards and neighborhoods, Brichetto assures us, we can find nature everywhere, too—despite humans’ relentless efforts to constrain, pave over or poison it. Readers will relish her thoughtful essays rife with idiosyncratic humor and poetic reverence, like her observation that a purchased-turf lawn has been “gentrified by sod.”
In her summer section, Brichetto is particularly reverent toward cicadas, which can fall prey to new construction (the Nashville-based author was treated to two overlapping broods this summer). “He will sing with the moon,” she writes of one, “but I have his skin, which once held the sun.” In fall, her pockets “surrender snail shells, turn out twigs of spicebush, fumble oak apples round and dry.” A red-tailed hawk transforms her from a winter commuter to “a character in a fairy story.” And she composes a spring ode to catalpa trees, which she suggests may be “admired by pressing one’s face into a pyramid of blossom.”
This Is How a Robin Drinks is sure to trigger an uptick in meanderings—urban or rural, day or night—suffused with new appreciation for and a renewed determination to preserve our endlessly fascinating yet increasingly vulnerable environment. And not a moment too soon; after all, Brichetto writes, “Spoiler alert: nature’s best hope is us.”
In March 1921, the world-famous botanist and geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was named director of the Bureau of Applied Botany and Plant Breeding, which was located in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg, Russia) and devoted to the study of plant life. He initiated an ambitious plan to develop the world’s first seed bank, which he promised would be “a treasury of all known crops and plants” that would produce super crops that could alleviate global famine.
Award-winning author Simon Parkin vividly relates the tragic yet inspiring story of Vavilov and his team’s dedication to the project in The Forbidden Garden: The Botanists of Besieged Leningrad and Their Impossible Choice. By 1934, Vavilov’s pioneering effort had opened over 400 research facilities around the Soviet Union. The seeds, “stored in packets and filed for safekeeping in the wooden drawers that lined the seed bank’s dozens of rooms,” were irreplaceable; in some cases, they had been harvested from crops now extinct due to human activity. Vavilov recruited and trained a staff that understood their worth and felt a “keen sense of responsibility.”
In August 1940, Vavilov vanished. And in June 1941, German troops invaded the Soviet Union. Leningrad’s industrial factories gave the city strategic importance, and as the birthplace of revolutionary Communism, it “symbolized all that Nazi ideology opposed.” Hitler decided to “starve it into submission.” Without support from Stalin’s government and unable to move the seeds, the Plant Institute staff and others in the city lived and died through 872 days of siege.
The remaining staff now faced a moral question. “Eat or abstain?” Parkin writes. “Is any sacrifice justifiable in the name of scientific progress, or to protect one’s research? What responsibility did the botanists hold to the survival of future generations? . . . There is no doubt that the quarter of a million seeds, nuts and vegetables in the building . . . could have prolonged the lives of the botanists and, beyond that, the public.” A new director encouraged them to eat the collection, but, committed to their mission, they refused. Using the diaries and letters of the botanists, as well as later-recorded oral histories, Parkin paints a suspense-filled record of this harrowing time in history.
The oral history form can sometimes feel like a cop-out—a notebook dump that requires the author to do little but interview and transcribe and put passages in a reasonable order.
But Paper of Wreckage: The Rogues, Renegades, Wiseguys, Wankers, and Relentless Reporters Who Redefined American Media gets a pass. The book’s subject, the New York Post’s past 50 years, includes so many famous and infamous characters, world events and weird historical side quests that the oral history form makes perfect sense. Plus, most of the subjects interviewed are colorful storytellers in their own right, making the blocks of text propulsive and vibrant without authorial intervention.
This could be a book about journalism, sports journalism, political journalism, gossip journalism, celebrity, serial killers, labor, New York City, Donald Trump or Rupert Murdoch. Instead, it’s all of the above. Authors Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacomo, both Post veterans themselves, have a sense for narrative (or at times, comedic) timing. Some well-known figure is described negatively and then immediately shows up to defend themself (or admit wrongdoing). An interviewee describes a funny or bad experience with a Post co-worker, only for the co-worker to respond directly in the next paragraph. Even journalists remember things differently.
Two ex-Posties compare Murdoch’s arrival at the tabloid in the 1970s to Hitler’s arrival in Poland. But for the most part, the crew at the newspaper didn’t take themselves too seriously. Some went on to illustrious stints at more respectable publications, but still recall their time at the Post as the most fun and memorable of their careers. It was a funnier, dirtier, meaner, more violent and more exciting newsroom than most—including the New York Daily News and New York Times, with whom the Post has traded scoops and staffers back and forth for generations.
The story sobers as it nears the present day. The paper’s right-wing politics become more entrenched, and the embrace of longtime Page Six stalwart Donald Trump and his presidency sour even those who still held out hope for the paper. The publication whiffs on the transition to television and then the internet, and its sway in New York faded. But the ride up to that point will entertain anyone interested in media, politics, celebrity or good stories.
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